THE RUNDOWN: Still. Old. Friend.

3 Comments | Posted: July 2nd, 2009 | Filed under: The Rundown

1.
Today, I was working for a bit at my preferred local hangout for such things and one of the regular customers wanted to talk to me about Archie getting married.. I had to explain it in simple terms: “possible future” and “imaginary story” and the like, but what I really wanted to say was “This is going to be like The Dark Knight Returns for Archie, a possible future where he’s loved and lost and eventually wears bulky armor and fights Jughead in the streets.”

2.
Marvel Divas #1 is very good. Aguirre-Sacasa’s got a light touch that fits better with these characters than it did on the ill-fated (if occasionally interesting) Marvel Knights 4 series, and the clean interior art from Tonci Zonjic reminds me of Stuart Immonen’s super-refined Nextwave style while still having a lot of its own personality. While I’m familiar with the four characters here (Firestar, Captain Marvel (the good one – yes, I said it and I won’t take it back), Hellcat, and the Black Cat,) the story doesn’t rely on knowing their backstories or anything about them, really: they’re just four superhero-ish chicks that have lives outside of the spandex.

A goddamn shame about that J. Scott Campbell cheesecake cover, even if I know exactly why they did it. Maybe it would have been better as a sigh…variant for the type of people that like that sort of thing and actually having an image that reflected the type of comic it is to help sell it to the non-indoctrinated who might pick it up out of curiosity? Shit, I’d have made Jamie McKelvie do the covers, but he owes me $9 and I’d do anything to get that money back.

Please note that McKelvie does not actually owe me $9.

3.
Outside of some very-last-panel confusion that someone brought up in a chat earlier – I honestly misread the location that panel was taking place in, making me rethink what actually occured – Batman And Robin #2 is pretty terrific. I do like that Morrison trusts the readers to keep up (as I’ve said a million times) but a caption here and there never hurt anyone, except for Chris Claremont who was fatally wounded in a Orzechowski-related shooting in 1991. Setting aside this quibble (which would have gone unnoticed until my confusion at the beginning of the third issue) my only question is: will we see the new Quad-Bat vehicle mudding?

4.
Agents of Atlas is my favorite Marvel comic right now. This issue is a perfect example of why: it’s smart but not smarmy, witty but not over-the-top, and it’s got a lot of heart. I genuinely care about a character called Gorilla-Man and wonder at what’s going on in a giant robot’s mind in my idle hours. (Seriously, the other day I was just thinking about how rad M-11 is, then I got told that my hour was up and that the receptionist would need to see my insurance card to make sure the psychiatric visit was covered by my co-pay.)

Also there’s a dragon, and I fucking hate shit with dragons most of the time. (Other notable exception: Fing Fang Foom.)

5.
The Boys. I may switch to trades on it. I enjoy it and all, but it seems that the per-issue dose has been getting a bit lean versus just getting to wallow in the story when the reasonably-priced collection hits the stands.

6.
I completely forgot to mention that The Daily Batman has been celebrating the contents of the exemplary The Black Casebook collection. (Except it’s curiously missing the story where the GCPD trains backup Batmans. That needs to be exhumed.)

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